DCEmulation

Hey Rand,

I see you here pretty often but not really posting much, but I was wondering if you could make a little speech type thing about what happened to Bleem (we know what happened but I mean more detail) and maybe what your plans for the future are. I know a lot of people have been wondering about these things though I know you will make some kind of official DCEmu "statement to the public" when you are ready. Anyway thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule to come here. Not very many famous people do that.

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It's all About the Pentiums!!!

Basically they didn't have enough money to support Bleem! anymore and had to give in to Sony's constant lawsuits. I believe that is basically it.

A real pity that...

What I've been wondering, is what is going to happen with Bleem!'s future?

Of course the product will not exist anymore, but will Rand move onto anything else afterwards? perhaps join a software company or something?
also will the lawsuits continue? or will they drop off from Bleem! being dropped?

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Spiderman! Spiderman! Friendy Neighbourhood Spiderman!
Spins a web... any size..... catches thiefs, just like flies!
WATCH OUT... here comes the Spiderman!

I know the story. I'm not telling, however, because if Rand wanted you guys to know he would tell you what happened. :p

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[url=http://www.consolevision.com]Multiple Console Emulation at it's best: consolevision.com! Dreamcast, Xbox, Game Boy Advance, PlayStation2 and more!
[/url]

Hey I had an idea... Telling by Rands attitude it looks like he's the kind of guy to say that _BLEEM_ is gone but then come back and rename it or something..

Wishful thinking.

i heard bleem went under not because of lack of money but because with sega going multi-platform they wanted to get in good with sony and treatened to sue bleem for not paying them royalties

Grr... have to retype this... Damn thing didnt send I guess.

Dreamcaster1 I dont know where you get your info but its wrong.

Bleem is not licsensed by Sega therefore no royalties need to be paid. If Sega was to take them to court and (somehow) win then many other companies would fallow suit. BUT it has already been proven in court that you dont need to be licensed to develop for a system.

There are unlicensed games going all the way back to the Atari 2600 days.... possibly even before.

Remember Galoob's GameGenie? It was not licensed Nintendo took them to court and lost.

Gameshark (on all the systems its avalible for) is not licensed. None of the companies that make the systems have made 1 dollar from it.

Accolade was sued by Sega ( http://www.maushammer.com/segavsaccolade.html ) for making unlicensed games for sega genesis that still showed the SEGA logo when they booted up. It was decided in that case that it was legal to use the boot code even if it is found through reverse engineering of copyrighted works. But only if no other way is possible and the company useing it makes it known that they are not actually licensed.

I beleave that it was Sony's lawsuits and constant pressure that finally became too much for Bleem!.

Emulators have been the subject of several court cases... Most of the time the emulator author wins. But not always... normally the cause of the loss is that the author used the actual BIOS of the system as the core instead of writing their own. (Bleem wrote their own) Sony probibly knew they wouldnt win... but knew that they had enough money to throw at the lawyers to eventually get Bleem to stop one way or another.

Not the first time Sony took on another company because they didnt like them... Albet didnt like them for differant reasons. And went about messing up their world in a differant way.

[Anti-Sony Rant Start]

A lot of people dont know Sony and Nintendo were working on a cdrom add-on for the SNES called (beleave it or not) Playstation. Sony's lawyers wrote up a contract that made Sony get ALL the royaltys for anything made for the Playstation (Nintendo would get licensing fees only) Of course Nintendo backed out. Sony got pissed and decided to make a new system and knock Nintendo out of the #1 spot in the console world.

Looks like they succeeded at that too. Imagine... if Sony wasnt so greedy with the royaltys back then we may have never seen the Playstation as we know it. Bleem! probibly would have never existed eather. (unless they did Saturn games instead...)

Dont forget the hype around PS2. It's a big part of why the Dreamcast is now dead. Sony lyed about the performace abilitys. Making it seem MUCH better than Dreamcast... even though the differances between them made them rather close to even. (albet the built in DVD player was nice) In many peoples opinion PS2's game quality didnt start catching up to Dreamcasts until after the Dreamcast was officially out of production.

My hope now is that Microsoft's X-box (Yes I know Microsoft is another greedy mega monster of a company) out grows Sony's installed (and brainwashed) user base and kicks Sony out of the #1 spot. Nintendo's Gamecube can probibly thrive in its 'for kids' nitch without X-Box or PS2 takeing much of its market. Nintendo may surprise me (and many other people) and retake the #1 spot.

[/Anti-Sony Rant Start]

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My old Sig was broken. Enter the new Sig!

IMHO the PS2 is much better, power wise, than the Dreamcast. Sorry, but it's true. However, the PS2's difficulty in coding meant that the first generation titles looked only as good as or worse than their DC counterparts, which were second generation DC titles at that point. The reason the PS2's visuals looked better than the DC's a year later was for the same reason second generation DC titles outshined their launch counterparts.

But these days there's a huge barrier to entry for the console market. You'll never see the likes of a 3DO or an Indrema again. And when Sega, a seasoned vet whose main crime was a string of mistakes with the Saturn, can't hang - it's a sign. Note that Microsoft is reportedly going to lose $2 Billion before 2004 sees XBox turning a profit. This is not a market for the weak - it's for the survivalists and those who can afford to play. It's been theorized that were it not for the cash cow that was Pokemon, Nintendo would not have been able to come out with GameCube and would have reverted to a GameBoy only company.

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Schnapple

Did I scroll down too far? Why has this topic about an announcement from Bleem! turned into a debate about which console is more powerful?

As for Bleem! going under, I believe that this was their plan all along to give up after MGS and TK3 were released. Call it a hunch if you like but it seems to me that a company would have to be pretty stupid to go for such a small gaming minority as the Dreamcast community to earn a living.

With the arrival of CD-only based machines, Bleem! are now able to expand their operation exponentially! (X-Box plays PS2 games for example...)

But answer me this......

"Why weren't there ANY adverts for ANYTHING on the Bleem! site?!!"

Even the lowliest and most dispised of pirate game sites still manage to find revenue from some form of advertising but Bleem! had absolutely NONE!

Now that just strikes me as odd...

By the way, Rand (if you are listening). I loved Metal Gear Solid and Tekken 3 for Dreamcast! Keep up the good work with whatever it is you're doing now and all the best for the future.

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http://www.geocities.com/vanlardo HELP! I CAN'T POST ANY MORE MESSAGES! I KEEP GETTING MESSAGES TELLING ME TO COME BACK LATER!

Well remember that they had to make this decision probably in late 1999 to early 2000, when the Dreamcast was new and had just had the most successful console launch ever. Of course it's kinda like box office opening records - of course LOTR will take in more money than Titanic - higher ticket prices, more screens, etc. Dreamcast had a better launch than any other console because the market had grown so much since the last console launch (1996's N64 launch).

It looked like sales were climbing - indeed Sega predicted to sell 1.5 million DC's by March 2000 and they accomplished this by January, so they upped their prediction to 2 million by March 2000 (fiscal year cutoff). But then sales levelled off - 2 million units came considerably later. Sega suffered losses. Christmas 2000 was their best Christmas ever, but they still lost millions. The DC had failed to penetrate the casual mainstream gamer market and instead only appealed to the hardcore user.

This wouldn't have been 100% fatal for Bleem had the Bleemcast project not taken so long. However the project drug on and even had to change focus. By May 2001, after the PS2 launch and with XBox and GameCube on the horizon, the abandoned Dreamcast looked to be a relic and Bleemcast was doomed to low sales. The fact that many gamers sent their DC's to the pawn shop, Babbage's refused to carry it, and the fact that Sony continued their litigation didn't help.

Bleem was a briliant idea when it was concieved and had DC sales not levelled off and the platform abandoned it might have worked, too. However in a tech market governed by Moore's Law the curve didn't work in their favor.

And as for Bleem just going "into hiding", it's not impossible but it's not likely. Bleem.com never carried advertising because Bleem's products were supposed to bring in revenue - it's not some dippy content site with a comic strip or something, it's a commercial site. I think Bleem really is done for. Sad as it is, the fact that they advertised the 100-game packs and couldn't deliver on them really damaged their PR image. Myself and the others on this site are of course intelligent and understanding enough to realize why and how, but most people aren't.

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Schnapple